Friday, July 24, 2009

Google overreaches in latest anti-SPAM feature

Google is now adding an "Unsubscribe and report spam" option to newsletters and mailing lists. The problem I see with this is the classic "UNSUBSCRIBE ME" type post you tend to see on high traffic lists like Perl Beginners. People sign up for mailing lists. SPAM, by definition, is unsolicited. Encouraging people to mark things that are not SPAM as SPAM is wrong and dilutes the term. It is all well and good if Google wants to make it easy for people to unsubscribe from mailing lists, but they shouldn't be stigmatizing those mailing lists because someone wants to unsubscribe and doesn't know the proper way to do it.

3 comments:

People already click "report as spam" for everything they don't want: mailing lists, forwarded jokes from their family, you name it. Google isn't encouraging this behavior; if anything, they're trying to redirect it and educate their users.